Wayne Beaton's blog

On December 7/2018, the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors approved a new edition of the Eclipse Development Process (EDP) which introduces one particularly significant change, along with a small number of other useful changes. We rolled this new edition out on December 14/2018.

Note that project teams who are familiar with the previous edition of the EDP can just keep doing what they’ve always done: all changes in this new edition are backwards compatible.

The Eclipse Foundation Specification Process defines a general framework for developing specifications in open source at the Eclipse Foundation; it extends the Eclipse Development Process (EDP) by adding a few extra checks and balances.

The primary role of the Eclipse IP Team is to reduce the risks associated with adopting open source software. In broad terms, they ensure that the licenses on content are compatible, that provenance is clear, and that content otherwise unencumbered from a legal point-of-view (strictly speaking, the team does all of this only for Type B requests).

The Eclipse Architecture Council is in the process of making a change to how the Eclipse Development Process (EDP) defines the Reviews that Eclipse open source projects are required to engage in. Foremost on our minds is the nature of Release Reviews which the EDP current requires ahead of all major and minor releases (service releases are excused from the requirement).

In the world of open source, Committers are ones who hold they keys. Committers decide what code goes into the code base, they decide how a project builds, and they ultimately decide what gets delivered to the adopter community.

The term Intellectual Property (IP) refers to any sort of creative work, be it literature, art, or software. In the realm of open source software, artifacts like source code, documentation, and images are considered intellectual property. Unless otherwise stated, intellectual property is the property of its creator, who may grant permission for others to use that intellectual property by providing a license.

This post is based on a talk that Gunnar Wagenknecht and I delivered at the Open Source Leadership Summit 2017 and Devoxx US 2017. This content was recently published in the All Eyes on Open Source issue of JAX Magazine.